I saw a Reddit thread wherein folks were complaining that the phrase “pick-me girl” was being overused and applied to too many stereotypes. But nowhere did they really describe what it’s supposed to mean, or originally meant. Google was not particularly clarifying.
What is meant by it?
Here’s the first Google response I found:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/29/health/pick-me-girls-wellness/index.html
The term is used to describe a girl who does everything for external, mostly male validation.
Social media memes mock pick-me girls with lines like “‘I’ll have pizza, not like my friends who only eat salad,’ and ‘I like baking cookies. I don’t know why other girls don’t like it,’ are an exaggeration of the trope,” Galanti said.
So basically a girl who wants to be “one of the guys” and subtly denigrates other girls.
Correct, the implication is a woman who makes a point of departing from stereotypical female behaviors, but only in ways that make them more agreeable to men, and is loud and conspicuous about it.
“I’m not like the other girls. If my man spends all weekend watching sports with his buddies, I don’t mind. I might even join (but not in an obnoxious way). I also don’t care about feminism, I love cooking for my man, I think shopping is boring and I don’t spend much money. Please pick me!”
And where might I find one of these people IRL?
It sounds a bit like a “cool girl”:
I hope we can all agree that while there may be some arguable basis for the stereotype and the usefulness of a label, actual discussion of the behavior, especially as applied to specific people who allegedly qualify, can start to become nasty and ugly, so discretion and prudence are advisable to avoid treading into unpleasantness. Yes?
Yes, absolutely.
Me, until probably I was 30 (so, say, 2006). I cannot tell you how strongly it was messaged to me as a child that you can’t be both “girly” and respected, or that male approval was worth more than female approval–not just in sexual/romantic contexts, but at work, even within my family. I felt–and I think correctly–that to be taken seriously, I had to distance myself from “girls”, because “girls” were very clearly not respected. I don’t do this anymore. I don’t know if the world has gotten better, so it’s not needed, or if I got older, and a lot of this is because of how high school and very young men act towards women. And I’m also more self-aware of my internalized misogyny and try to excise it.
For a while, it was a thing where young men would complain about being “friendzoned”, where women they were attracted to classified them as “friends” and would never see them as potential lovers. This was always presented as a thing women did exclusively to men. This was baffling to me: growing up, it was very clear to me and my female friends that you could either date boys, or be respected by boys. I’m not talking about “if you put out, other boys won’t respect your sexual boundaries” respect, but like “if you are a girly girl, they will want to fuck you, but they won’t listen to you, or think of you as a person. If you want them to do that, you have to be “one of the boys”, which means rejecting all things girly, and also at least tacitly agree with all the scornful shit they say about the girly girls, including the ones they are dating”. I’m a generation off, but the dudes complaining about getting “friendzoned” seem exactly like the dudes I’d sit up taking philosophy and politics with in college and who very clearly separated the world into “datable girls” and “girls you could talk philosophy and politics with”.
So yeah. I was a total pick-me. I got better. But until really recently, it was very difficult to function in many spaces if you didn’t explicitly reject the “girly”.
ETA: rejecting all things “girly” included rejecting girly girls, and joining men in their scorn. You had to pick a team.
I was (?) a pick-me girl also. I very much tried to be “one of the guys” from a young age, even getting a very short haircut to appear less like a 
girl.
As I grew older, I wanted to be much more than friends with boys, but it was always all about the male approval.
When it comes to situations like this, where you hear a new phrase the kids are using and are perplexed, Urban Dictionary is your friend:
Whilst UD can be useful, has a better than 50% hit ratio and in this case appears to have fiven the correct definition; the percentage of misses where the top answer is absolute bunk is still far too high to reccommend it.
Yes, you do have to take UD definitions with a grain of salt, but it can be helpful in cases where a slang term is relatively new, and thus hasn’t gotten mainstream enough for a general googling to easily enlighten oneself. I’ve used it several times in such instances and it’s usually accurate enough to get the gist.
Do you have an example? People say this but I’ve never been let down by UD. You may have to read a few defs to get a sense, and a lot of times words mean different things in different contexts and regions/types of English. Reading the top two has always been enough for me.
What bothers me there is that it presents “pick me” behavior as exclusively an irrational, emotional need, like its just women and their daddy issues. Sometimes it is that, but isn-t that simple.
When I was growing up, it was objectively true that there was an inverse relationship between how feminine you were and how seriously people took you–especially men. This had real consequences, if you didn’t distance yourself from the feminine girls. You noticed pretty quick that “cheerleader types” didn’t get listened to by teachers and other adults, and then, later, that receptionists often were “girly” but professionals weren’t. I still wouldn’t buy a pink work bag or luggage or planner or anything I take into “professional” spaces, and I have owned very few pink clothes in my life–and I do own bright blue and red things, so it isnt just about color in general. Its pink, and I like pink. But I don’t wanted to be treated like a woman who likes pink.
In general, I think this has gotten much better. But I thonk there have been a lot of reasons beyond a simple need for approval that women explicitly reject “girl things”.
I think the ‘pick-me’ part of the term itself clarifies that it’s inherently meant as emotionally driven, attention seeking behavior, rather than as a healthy decision to be one’s own person.
This YouTube short explains it fairly well, IMHO. If you want more context just search for “Pick me girl” on YouTube or Tik Tok.
But those are not the only two choices.
Sometimes, I have been (am?) a pick-me girl because I didn’t want men to treat me like they treated the “girly girls”, and I preferred respect from the people that had power in society over respect from women who were girly girls (and so had been dismissed).
Thats not being “true to myself”, but its not “attention seeking” in the pejorative sense.
Well, I mean, I only first heard of the term two hours ago myself, but I would say that just because a person may have taken on a different persona at one time or another in order to get attention, or they change behavior to seek a positive response in a certain situation, it doesn’t necessarily mean the term applies to them. We all do those things at one time or another. The term, I’d say, is meant for those who habitually do those things, and probably out of a lack of self-esteem.
It’s like any pejorative term. Let’s say, just off the top of my head, the term ‘mooch’. I have occasionally borrowed a dollar or two from people over the years, or let them pick up a lunch tab, and I imagine I’ve forgotten to pay it back a time or two. But I don’t think that makes me a ‘mooch’ because for the most part, I pay my debts.
‘Pick me’ is almost exclusively used for women who desperately want a man/marriage/relationship, and engage in sycophantic behavior toward that goal.
Getting ahead in the workplace, socially, etc., is almost never the context.
Speaking as a middle-aged female professional in STEM with a serious textile-craft addiction, I’d say that yes it’s better, but it’s still quite a ways from fixed.
It’s helped somewhat that there are now some higher-visibility venues for serious discussion of scientific aspects of textile craft, like crocheting hyperbolic planes or graph-theoretic analyses of blackwork embroidery or what have you. But the aversion to the “girliness” of needlework in all its forms is still quite entrenched.
I’d say it’s still pretty much the norm for social chat in STEM workplaces, among all genders, to embrace enthusiastic discussion of hobbies ranging from gaming to gourmet cooking to outdoor sports to DIY to homebrewing, pet training, beekeeping, whatever. But references to textile-related subjects (especially anything fashion-related) will be politely received but never encouraged or pursued.
Never mind the fact that everybody wears clothes and also relies on textiles in many other ways every goddamn day of their lives, I guess? It is still coded as too “girly” a subject for “serious professionals” to take any interest in.